...Bring Out Your Dead...

Forgive the Monty Python reference, but both my body and my mind were dead tired on Thursday, and combined with the difficult Glashedy Links the results were predictably apocalyptic (OK, that's perhaps a wee bit melodramatic).  But the golf was not pretty, the saving grace being that Theresa didn't have to see it.  The reader will by now know that what I really meant to say was more along the lines of, thank my lucky stars it wasn't a match day.

Fortunately, Lowell's strong play continued, as he continued to find the center stripe of fairway after fairway.  My play had many high points, including two near misses at my first avian life form of the trip.  But it also included many swings of the long and wrong variety, and the bag was substantially llighter at the end of play.

Lowell's bunker play was solid on both days (top), and he strikes his second on the Par 5 4th from an unusual position, a couple of feet off the fairway.(bottom).

Carol kept us company on our stroll, though my propensity to hit the crooked ball, had us all looking bedraggled from stomping through the treacherous maram grass all day.

The ball on the left is visual evidence of my best effort of the day, reaching the Par 5 fourth (459 yards) in two.  Well, two if you ignore that the drive was a providional ball and ignore the two slashes at the original drive, the second sending it to meet its maker.  There's little doubt that reaching Par 5's in two is far more satisfying when....you know, the ball is in play.

But despite the dire weather forecast, the day's play was without rain and with mostly diminished winds.  It was Carol's first visit to Ballyliffin (Lowell had played the courses, but not for some time), and they were equally enraptured by the physical beauty and stark isolation one sense while on either course.

Top, just another day at the office in Ballyliffin.  Bottom, when we're at last sure that we won't get wet, gallant lowell helps his bride lose the waterproofs.

Unfortunately the winds picked up late and dead into the worst of it, the Par 5 seventeenth felt like the Bataan Death March to us all.  We regrouped and made two pars at the mercifully downwind home hole, and repaired to the second floor bar for vital bodily fluids (i.e., Carlsberg on tap).

 

The above video gets a little herky-jerky at the end, and at some point I'll have to learn how to edit such things out.  The banter at the end is because Lowell's ball comes to rest on the precipice above the back bunker, and it was not clear whether it would hold.

Friday will be mostly a day of rest for the weary road warriors, with the bride having booked us massages.  We'll go out lat in the day and play in the 9-hole members scramble, which should be a good opportunity to meet new folks.